Category Archives: Command Line

I have been trying to create screencasts using RecordMyDesktop on Ubuntu. While the app itself functioned well I had a serious problem with the image quality: switching windows seemed to lead to massive diagonal pixelation of the captured images rendering the screencast useless.

I played around for a while with various RecordMyDesktop settings (frame rate, full capture etc) but to no avail. Some searching on the web brought me to this forum post which appeared to describe an exactly similar problem — the screenshot in the original question was almost identical in pixellation effect to what I was seeing. (Aside: interestingly the user says there problem arose after they installed compiz so that may be part of the cause …)

While the forum did not have a resolution for RecordMyDesktop it did provide a working ffmpeg command line command that worked perfectly:

About the release

This release brings substantial improvements to the download functionality of datapkg including support for extending the download system via plugins. The full changelog below has more details and here’s an example of the new download system being used to download material selectively from the COFOG package on CKAN.

Much of this was inspired by this blog post. Having tested on my own set of files I would suggest that these methods could be ranked in order of accuracy as:

TexCount.pl

untex + wc

wc

pdf file

wc

$ wc -w file.tex

This is very simple but is pretty inaccurate since wc has no awareness of tex commands or mathematics (which results in overcounting) and does not expand things like bibliographies (which results in undercounting). Overall the result is likely to be a substantial overcount.

This is a simple hack to enable you to start OpenOffice and, more importantly, open documents with it from the command line. I’ve got the standard X port of OpenOffice 2.0 installed, so if you have something different you may need to change the path to soffice given below (to find soffice on your machine try from the command line $ locate soffice):

First let’s make the script that starts openoffice available in a convenient way e.g. by symlinking into ~/bin or /usr/bin:

Having looked around for a while without success for something that would spit out csv files as ascii tables I decided to hack something together. The result is a small python script csv2ascii.py. It is currently fairly crude, for example it just truncates cell text which is too long, but I hope I’ll have some more time to improve it soon.

Despite its free availability i can’t find one version formatted in a way I actually like. Anyway here’s a link to one of the least bad (it’s plain vanilla html and supposedly a copy of the page Stephenson first posted on his website): http://steak.place.org/dougo/inthebeginning.html

Published in 1999 and though now a little dated this is still a great essay. It’s full of Stephenson’s wit and detailed down-to-earth explanations. My favourite part is the brilliant and hilarious ‘os as car’ metaphor:

The analogy between cars and operating systems is not half bad, and so let me run with it for a moment, as a way of giving an executive summary of our situation today.

Imagine a crossroads where four competing auto dealerships are situated. One of them (Microsoft) is much, much bigger than the others. It started out years ago selling three-speed bicycles (MS-DOS); these were not perfect, but they worked, and when they broke you could easily fix them.

There was a competing bicycle dealership next door (Apple) that one day began selling motorized vehicles–expensive but attractively styled cars with their innards hermetically sealed, so that how they worked was something of a mystery.

The big dealership responded by rushing a moped upgrade kit (the original Windows) onto the market. This was a Rube Goldberg contraption that, when bolted onto a three-speed bicycle, enabled it to keep up, just barely, with Apple-cars. The users had to wear goggles and were always picking bugs out of their teeth while Apple owners sped along in hermetically sealed comfort, sneering out the windows. But the Micro-mopeds were cheap, and easy to fix compared with the Apple-cars, and their market share waxed.

Eventually the big dealership came out with a full-fledged car: a colossal station wagon (Windows 95). It had all the aesthetic appeal of a Soviet worker housing block, it leaked oil and blew gaskets, and it was an enormous success. A little later, they also came out with a hulking off-road vehicle intended for industrial users (Windows NT) which was no more beautiful than the station wagon, and only a little more reliable.

Since then there has been a lot of noise and shouting, but little has changed. The smaller dealership continues to sell sleek Euro-styled sedans and to spend a lot of money on advertising campaigns. They have had GOING OUT OF BUSINESS! signs taped up in their windows for so long that they have gotten all yellow and curly. The big one keeps making bigger and bigger station wagons and ORVs.

On the other side of the road are two competitors that have come along more recently.

One of them (Be, Inc.) is selling fully operational Batmobiles (the BeOS). They are more beautiful and stylish even than the Euro-sedans, better designed, more technologically advanced, and at least as reliable as anything else on the market–and yet cheaper than the others.

With one exception, that is: Linux, which is right next door, and which is not a business at all. It’s a bunch of RVs, yurts, tepees, and geodesic domes set up in a field and organized by consensus. The people who live there are making tanks. These are not old-fashioned, cast-iron Soviet tanks; these are more like the M1 tanks of the U.S. Army, made of space-age materials and jammed with sophisticated technology from one end to the other. But they are better than Army tanks. They’ve been modified in such a way that they never, ever break down, are light and maneuverable enough to use on ordinary streets, and use no more fuel than a subcompact car. These tanks are being cranked out, on the spot, at a terrific pace, and a vast number of them are lined up along the edge of the road with keys in the ignition. Anyone who wants can simply climb into one and drive it away for free.

Customers come to this crossroads in throngs, day and night. Ninety percent of them go straight to the biggest dealership and buy station wagons or off-road vehicles. They do not even look at the other dealerships.

Of the remaining ten percent, most go and buy a sleek Euro-sedan, pausing only to turn up their noses at the philistines going to buy the station wagons and ORVs. If they even notice the people on the opposite side of the road, selling the cheaper, technically superior vehicles, these customers deride them cranks and half-wits.

The Batmobile outlet sells a few vehicles to the occasional car nut who wants a second vehicle to go with his station wagon, but seems to accept, at least for now, that it’s a fringe player.

The group giving away the free tanks only stays alive because it is staffed by volunteers, who are lined up at the edge of the street with bullhorns, trying to draw customers’ attention to this incredible situation. A typical conversation goes something like this:

Hacker with bullhorn: “Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!”

Prospective station wagon buyer: “I know what you say is true…but…er…I don’t know how to maintain a tank!”

Bullhorn: “You don’t know how to maintain a station wagon either!”

Buyer: “But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music.”

Bullhorn: “But if you accept one of our free tanks we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!”

wdiff’ is a front-end to GNU diff. It compares two files, finding which words have been deleted or added to the first in order to create the second. It has many output formats and interacts well with terminals and pagers (notably with less').wdiff’ is particularly useful when two texts differ only by a few words and paragraphs have been refilled.

About

Dr Rufus Pollock is Founder and President of Open Knowledge, an international non-profit using advocacy, technology and training to unlock information and turn it into insight and change. He was formerly a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and the holder of the Mead Fellowship at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Read more »